2025-03-19
37 分钟This is the Guardian, the Guardian Archive.
Long read.
Hi, I'm Nicholas Mulder and I'm the author of the Revolt Against Liberalism, what's Driving Poland and Hungary's Nativist Turn, which was published in the Guardian.
Long read.
In 2021.
I wrote this story at a time when many people were trying to take stock of what had happened in Eastern and Central Europe in the three decades since the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989.
And it was a moment of reflection to ask, where has Eastern Europe come from?
What is the balance sheet after 30 years?
And this was before the war in Ukraine.
And the thing that really stood out at the time was that while many countries had gotten a lot richer, they hadn't necessarily all embraced Western liberal politics.
And Poland, which was then under the Law and Justice Party of the Kaczynski government, and Hungary under Viktor Orban were the two most prominent states that had really turned away from liberalism.
So I was drawn to this story because these seem to be things that didn't.
Didn't really match the standard narrative that we had in the west of an end of history, a convergence on liberal norms.
And I became interested in researching what did Polish and Hungarian and other Eastern European nationalists, people that we came to refer to as illiberals, think they were doing in 1989 and also in the decades after that.
And what I found was actually that they had a quite different view of what 1989 had been about, that it had not been the final revolt and liberation from communism, but just the beginning of a much longer process of transformation.
And that much of their resentment against the EU came from this idea that they had merely traded masters, so to speak, that they had swapped out the empire of Moscow for the empire of Brussels.
So, looking at this piece now, in 2025, a number of things have changed.
One of the big things, of course, is that the war in Ukraine that's now been going on for three years has really been the main story in Eastern Europe, and it's completely changed politics of the European Union and I would say, even of the world in general.
But it's also been a period in which some of the governments have changed in Eastern Europe.
Most notably, the Law and Justice government of Kosinski and his followers is no longer in power.